Sometimes, Dick Mell can’t help but laugh, like that time when he waved an assistant precinct captain up to the front of the VFW hall in his ward.
The 100 other campaign workers, crowded together before the podium, craned their necks while the rugged city sewer laborer, both his wrists in casts, walked sheepishly from his place.
“Here’s a guy who gives his all for the organization,” said Mell, fairly bubbling with glee. He slapped the injured man on the shoulder. “He broke his wrists trimming a tree–to get a vote!”
Even Mell had a hard time believing this. He was amazed at the depth of loyalty he engendered, the extent to which his people would go to please him. He was on top of the world.
“This is the type of guy we need in this organization,” Mell said.
The type Mell has by the hundreds.
Dick Mell is a ward boss– the alderman and Democratic committeeman in one of Chicago’s 50 wards. For 21 years, he has fought the street-level battles of city politics with great gusto–and great success.
He’s a skilled organizer and a charismatic field marshal. And, if at times he’s skirted the edge of propriety–using a gang leader as a campaign worker, and hitting up liquor licensees for political contributions, even as he threatens to close their businesses–well, you have to do what it takes to win.
In return, Mell has reaped the spoils of victory.
Take city jobs. The alderman has. Hundreds of them, for members of his political organization and his family.
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Or city services. New curbs, new streets, new alleys, new water mains–Chicago’s taxpayers have financed hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements for blocks in the ward where Mell lives and owns property.
This isn’t exactly democracy as the nation’s founders envisioned it. But, when it comes to winning elections, Mell could teach Democratic Party leaders a thing or two.
Mell leaves it to orators such as Mario Cuomo and this year’s Democratic keynote speaker, Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh, to articulate the party’s vision and philosophy. And he’s more than willing to let the thousands gathering this week in Chicago for the party’s national convention make their plans to right injustices, curb poverty, boost learning and cure the nation’s economic woes.
Mell doesn’t much care.
“To me, politics is a game of pluses. You identify your plus voters and get them to the polls.”
It’s as simple as that.
This week, as national Democrats plot tactics for the fall, some party leaders are seeking to go back to the future and assemble a new national army of precinct captains.
In a return to grass-roots electioneering, the party will blitzkrieg 20 states, including Illinois, with a force of 60,000 precinct workers who will go door to door to talk to voters, find likely supporters and get them to the polls in November.
Mell doesn’t laugh out loud at such plans. But he knows, even if national party leaders don’t, that you can’t start a precinct organization from scratch and expect success.
Born 58 years ago into a factory-worker family on the semirural edges of Muskegon, Mich., Richard Franklin Mell has been the virtual king of Chicago’s 33rd Ward for more than two decades, the most important figure in a 2.5-square-mile section of one of the largest cities in the world.
Little happens in Mell’s corner of the universe–a gritty community of factories, corner bars, well-tended bungalows and hulking apartment buildings crowded with immigrants–without his knowledge, without his permission.
As the alderman, Mell is the ward’s only representative in the City Council. More important in the realpolitik of Chicago, he is, as Democratic committeeman, the commander-in-chief of an army of 1,000 political workers who are never off duty.
In an era when most politicians are fleeting images on TV screens mouthing carefully crafted sound bites, Mell is government in the flesh for the ward’s 56,000 constituents.
They can see him at community meetings, touch his hand and feel his grip. They can win his favor or–God forbid–provoke his ire. He hauls their neighbors into court for run-down buildings, untangles the red tape choking off their Social Security checks and gets them stop signs to thwart side-street speeders. Everyone knows that Mell and his precinct captains don’t do all this out of the goodness of their hearts.
The most frequently uttered phrase in the 33rd Ward is: “Remember me on Election Day.” The goal is to keep Mell and his organization in power, and Mell’s workers do what it takes.
Nothing else matters.
The rats and the garbage
“Remember in the old days when we used to pass out the garbage cans?” Mell asks as he leans back in his chair in his cavernous City Hall office, more befitting a captain of industry than a minor municipal official.
His desk is free of paper of any sort. Everything Mell needs to know is in his head or filed safely away. The walls are covered with nature photographs he’s shot and stuffed fish he’s hooked. The alderman, dressed in a well-tailored gray suit and a vibrantly colored tie, drums his fingers on the arm of his chair and taps his foot as he talks. He can’t sit still. He never can.
For decades, garbage cans were the coin of the realm for Democratic precinct captains in Chicago. You could get a free garbage can–but only if you went through your captain. It was a wonderful favor to be able to bestow. Everyone has garbage, right?
But, Mell says, beaming at the memory, his eyes widening in pleasure, one rookie captain went a step too far.
In the aftermath of an election, Mell found the captain prowling through an alley in the ward, dumping garbage out and snatching the cans back from voters who had failed to show up at the polling place.
“Wayne, you can’t take their cans,” Mell told the rookie with a mixture of exasperation and delight.
“Why not? I gave them to them.”
Politics is special in Chicago. It’s major league. It’s “You scratch my back, I’ll stab yours.”
“When you win (in Chicago politics), your opponent is not beaten: he is eliminated, wiped out, dismembered and sometimes simply killed,” wrote Bill and Lori Granger in “Lords of the Last Machine,” published in 1987. “No one weeps for the losers. . . .If you are not going to be a winner, you do not Belong in the game at all. It is the first obligation of the winners to show you this.”
In Chicago, the Democratic Party–the city has few Republicans–is the Siamese twin of government, the twin who makes all the decisions.
Mell is able to wield iron control in his fiefdom because virtually the entire city government has been structured to buttress ward-level political operations.
Free garbage cans may be a museum item now, but they’ve been replaced by new favors– such as the removal of unwanted garages.
Two years ago, Michael and Laura Renteria were surprised when one of Mell’s captains came to their home on Fletcher Street and offered to have the city tear down their dilapidated garage– “for free”–under a program aimed at rat-infested garages.
Neither Renteria had ever seen a rat in or near their garage. No matter. City workers came, and the garage came down. All at a cost to taxpayers of about $1,400.
“Mell’s like this,” a former precinct captain explains. “If he can’t do something for you, he doesn’t trust you.”
Drive-by shoutings
Supremely self-assured, Dick Mell tools down California Avenue in his late model midnight blue Lincoln Continental on a bright morning. He is a happy man.
Mell, who brags of an annual income of $500,000 or more from his spring factory and other businesses, likes to drive. He likes the control of it. Even on long trips, he avoids airplanes if he can and takes to the road. To Colorado, and back; to Canada, and back.
He listens to books on tape. And to radio call-in shows. But, even more, Mell talks.
He loves to talk, can’t stop himself from talking–big flowing stream-of-consciousness monologues like rivers that seem to have no beginning and no end.
Mell talks fast, and he drives fast. He zips from one corner of his ward to another in a flash.
During an election, the alderman likes to drive past the campaign office of an opponent, shouting taunts from his window.
“Hey, there’s Margie Stoll. Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah! You’re going to lose.”
That’s what Stoll, whose actual first name is Marja, says Mell yelled at her last year when she was running against his aldermanic candidate in the nearby 35th Ward.
Mell says, “I think I probably said: You’re going to lose.”
Back in 1987, when Mell trounced his toughest aldermanic opponent, Rev. Donald Benedict, he drove past the Benedict headquarters and yelled at two women standing outside, “You women ain’t worth (expletive).”
At least, that’s what Benedict and others say.
Mell says, “I don’t remember doing it. I don’t think I did it. I would say I didn’t do it.”
Who comes first?
Mell’s ward is not an especially large area, but it is amazingly complex. Up along Kedzie Avenue, especially around Lawrence Avenue, business signs are a mix of Korean, Arabic and English. More than a third of 33rd Ward residents were born in another country, according to an analysis of 1990 census data by the Metro Chicago Information Center.
Lawyers and architects live in elegant $300,000 homes while, only a block or two away, large families cram themselves into small apartments in aged courtyard buildings.
A lot of people. A lot of needs. A lot for Mell to keep in balance so that everyone’s satisfied. But listen to Gloria Chevere, a longtime Mell ally in the Puerto Rican community.
“You know what’s interesting about his organization? The precinct captains come first.”
As many as 400 of Mell’s campaign soldiers are city or state employees, and the alderman lobbies constantly for new jobs to bestow on favored members of the organization.
“In other ward organizations, on ward night, everybody’s out there to see the alderman or committeeman, and everybody takes a number,” Chevere notes. “In Mell’s organization, if there’s a captain waiting to see the boss, the boss will see him first. These are the guys who don’t have to take a number.”
Mell’s family doesn’t take a number either.
His elderly mother has been on the city payroll in several positions, and his son, Richard, has a job with the Aviation Department. His daughter, Patti, had a summer job at City Hall, while her husband, Rod Blagojevich, was on Mell’s staff until the alderman orchestrated Blagojevich’s election to the Illinois General Assembly.
But take a look at city documents, and it’s impossible to know what the son-in-law did for his pay.
There are records that show him being paid by four different City Council committees in the space of two months, involved in such vastly diverse work as municipal code revision, transportation, legislative research and council rules and ethics. And there’s one official who says Blagojevich worked in City Hall during at least part of 1989.
But Blagojevich says he spent his entire career in his father-in-law’s ward office doing Mell’s bidding.
What’s going on?
Nothing unusual for Chicago, where the slippery-slidey personnel system of the City Council permits employees to be paid by a committee and work elsewhere, even outside City Hall and at an alderman’s ward office where the nuts-and-bolts political labor is done.
Mell says everything is fine. He vouches for his son-in-law.
“Nobody who has ever worked for me doesn’t have to do his job.”
For Mell, the center of the 33rd Ward is the four-square-block section where he lives and has his ward office and manufacturing plant.
And he takes good care of it.
Time and again, city trucks have rumbled up to Mell’s home in the 3600 block of North Mozart Street, and to buildings he owns on two other blocks in the ward, to deliver new curbs, alleys, streets and water mains that have cost Chicago taxpayers at least $720,000 since 1992.
Just a coincidence, the alderman says.
One water main, installed last fall in front of the spacious bungalow that Mell shares with his wife, Marge, and his 14-year-old standard poodle, Spunky, had a price tag of more than a quarter of a million dollars.
When the work was done, the city planned to repave only the west side of Mozart, the part that was torn up to lay the new pipes. That’s the way it’s usually done. But not on Mell’s street.
Mell got on the phone, and, as one Water Department official put it, “pitched a bitch” about the plans.
So the whole street was paved.
And the alderman was happy.
`Graffiti kills’
Dick Mell is a man given to hyperbole and grand gestures. He is untroubled by nuances, and can speak forcefully on any subject, great or small. It doesn’t matter.
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A fisherman with money enough to indulge his fancy, Mell brags, “How many people do you think live in the 300-mile radius around Chicago? Nobody, nobody, has caught as many different kinds of fish as me.”
He has the air of an actor or entertainer about him, and he’s hard to miss in a crowd. There’s his blindingly white hair (white since his mid-30s), his expensive clothes and his thick gold watch.
He is 6 feet tall, but he seems even taller, surrounded, as he usually is, by precinct captains and other aides who are, almost without exception, short. A meeting of his ward organization has the look of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Although a self-proclaimed hypochondriac, Mell has the perfect metabolism for a politician–energy to burn, and more. A stranger to contemplation, he craves action. During the raucous, all-night City Council meeting to name a new mayor following the death of Harold Washington, Mell couldn’t contain himself and leaped up on his desk in an effort to be heard.
The antic, memorialized in a photograph flashed around the world, made Mell the international symbol of a Chicago alderman.
The fact is: Council meetings are a particular purgatory for Mell.
In theory, Chicago has a weak mayor-strong council form of government. But, in fact, meetings of the 50 aldermen involve little more than rubber-stamping what has already been decided behind closed doors in the mayor’s fifth-floor City Hall office.
Aldermen, for the most part, limit themselves to introducing clerkish sorts of ordinances to permit sidewalk sales or allow businesses to put up canopies. An analysis of 163 pieces of legislation introduced by Mell over a five-year period shows that more than 60 percent involved streets and sidewalks.
One of his rare substantive proposals was a ban on spray paint that Mell trumpets as a major blow to gangs and gang graffiti in Chicago.
“Graffiti kills,” the alderman proclaims.
He’s always been over the top about graffiti. Consider this story he tells about himself:
It’s the wee hours of a Saturday morning several years ago, a couple hours after midnight, and Mell has discovered that teens from a dance at the high school half a block away have stolen into his alley and vandalized his garage with graffiti.
Rather than wait until daylight, Mell goes into his house, wakes his teenage son, Rich, and drags the boy out to the alley to help him paint out the offensive markings.
In the tired glare of a city lamp three quarters of the way up a utility pole, the frenetic father and his sleepy son slap paint over the crudely fashioned symbols and letters.
So what if Rich loses a little sleep? When those “moron taggers,” as Mell calls them, return in the morning to see their handiwork, it’ll be gone.
On gangs, the alderman’s record is more equivocal.
Since the days of Al Capone, ward bosses in Chicago have been known to use–and be used by–gangsters of one stripe or another. Gangs, after all, are a fact of life in many areas of the city. Besides, they and their families represent hefty numbers of voters.
Mell labels himself as “probably the biggest gangbuster in the world.” Yet, for years, he had a top gang leader–Ray Rolon of the Maniac Latin Disciples, known as “Boss Maniac”–as a precinct worker and campaign contributor. Last year, Rolon directed a contingent of 50 gang members on behalf of Mell’s candidate in a nearby ward.
To reach Rolon, all you had to do was phone Mell’s office. A secretary would take a message.
But Mell says Rolon has played only a minor role in his campaign army.
“Ray Rolon. One guy in a hundred, in a thousand people we got, has maybe been a gang member. I’m not even sure he is.”
`Somebody’s gonna die’
The alderman is steamed about corn.
He doesn’t like the Mexican pushcart vendors who wander his ward selling sweet corn, slathered with mayonnaise and margarine, and powdered with a white cheese and paprika.
For Muhammad Sulehria, a Pakistani, and Arlyn Lucena, a native of the Philippines, the corn, at $1 an ear, is an inexpensive treat on a lazy summer night in the park.
For 62-year-old Juan Garcia, a vendor with a leathered face and a resigned manner, it’s a living.
But many of the middle-class constituents of Mell’s ward find the carts offensive. These are the people who, like Mell, live behind the sparkling art-glass studded windows of fortress-like bungalows in the more affluent sections of the ward. They are also the alderman’s key voting bloc.
And Mell agrees with them 2,000 percent.
He tried the corn once. “It was tasty.” The next day, he was sick, and he blamed the corn, specifically the mayonnaise that had been sitting out in the sun.
Ever since, the alderman’s been on a crusade.
“What’s going to happen,” Mell declares to a roomful of community activists, hanging on his every word, “is that somebody’s gonna die from eating one of those mayonnaise corn, and all of a sudden we’re going to have a big, big blowup, and everybody’s going to start pointing fingers about why we didn’t do something in the first place.”
A political divorce
Dick Mell is crawling around on the floor of his bungalow, studying three large maps as if they contain the secrets of the ancients.
In fact, they hold his political future.
The night before, Al Ronan, a state legislator and Mell’s closest political ally, pulled a moving van up to the office they shared on Fullerton Avenue. He carried out boxes of his photos, files and belongings, and then drove off into the darkness.
Like any political divorce, this one is messy, the result of a complex set of factors ranging from the conflicting ambitions of two strong personalities to Ronan’s desire to change his lifestyle and live on the lakefront. And, for Mell’s political career, it could be fatal.
Ronan is a favorite of Mell’s precinct captains. Well-connected in state government, particularly among Republicans, he supplied the captains with vanity license plates and jobs.
Mell can’t be sure how many captains will stay with him and how many will follow Ronan. It was just such a split in the 33rd Ward organization, caused by Mell, a top precinct captain, that led to his election as alderman in 1975 and then committeeman a year later.
Even worse, Mell’s fellow committeemen smell blood in the water. They’re beginning to circle.
Mell reaches for the phone and summons his son-in-law.
Blagojevich, fresh from an afternoon jog, arrives and finds the ward boss still on his knees, poring over the maps.
“Ronan left me last night, and I’m looking for candidates to run for state rep. I’d like you to run here.” Mell points to one of maps. “I’ve got this community activist, Nancy Kaszak, over here.” Mell points to another.
For Mell, it makes sense. Blagojevich, with his alert manner and the sort of good looks a soap opera star would envy, is a perfect candidate. And Mell’s certainly toyed with the idea of launching the young man’s career, ever since Blagojevich married into the family 17 months earlier.
For the son-in-law, it’s a dream come true. Blagojevich has been nibbling at the edges of Chicago Democratic politics for more than a decade, seeking his big break.
The product of an immigrant Serbian family with few connections, Blagojevich has worked hard to find success, completing law school and becoming a trusted aide to Mell. His time in the alderman’s ward office, amid the rough-edged precinct captains–“the Chuckies and Dominics,” as the son-in-law calls them–has been an apprenticeship now bearing fruit.
“You interested in running?”
Sure, Blagojevich says, but he wants to know if he’ll be free to take his own stands on the issues.
“I don’t give a (expletive) about that,” the alderman says.
The son-in-law also rises
Mell’s gamble on Blagojevich paid off, and, 10 months later, in November, 1992, the son-in-law was elected to the legislature. So too was Kaszak, easily trouncing Ronan in a campaign blitz of precinct workers led by Mell.
Last March, the two proteges–Blagojevich and Kaszak–faced off for the Democratic nomination in the 5th Congressional District, long represented by House legend Dan Rostenkowski, who had been convicted of federal mail fraud charges.
In a campaign again rooted in the power of Mell’s organization, Blagojevich triumphed.
“You know what the bottom line was?” Mell asks with his best how-smart-I-am grin.
“Kaszak didn’t have a field operation.”
In November, Blagojevich–“the kid,” as Mell calls him–will oppose Michael Flanagan, the Republican who ousted Rostenkowski in 1994.
Mell, his political fences well-mended, appears on the threshold of extending his reach to Washington. Yet, as successful as Mell is, his fellow ward bosses put up with him more than they embrace him. They fear him more than they befriend him.
Mell is a new-breed ward boss. He doesn’t see himself as a cog in a machine, but as a free agent on a wide-open playing field in a game without rules. Indeed, he switches allegiances within the party, and sometimes even outside the party, at the drop of a hat.
Such free-lancing leads many old-line committeemen to gnash their teeth.
“He’s a fun guy. You laugh. But, if I had dinner with him, I’d have to have a food-taster,” says one veteran Northwest Side committeeman. “This guy, his word is no good.”
Yet, there are those, such as former Mayor Eugene Sawyer, who served more than a decade in the council with Mell, who find him, at least, direct.
“He’s not the kind of guy who would stab you in the back; he’d stab you in the chest.”
`To pay for things’
Mell has a lot to say about liquor in his ward.
In meeting after meeting, the alderman sits, surrounded by earnest civic activists, and, in his inimitably emphatic style, tells them what they want to hear.
They’re against loud taverns. He is, too, he says. They think there are too many liquor stores and other such establishments in the ward–140, at last count. So does he, he says.
“We’re going to visit every tavern in this ward,” Mell vows, “and say, `Look, fella, your tavern’s creating a nightmare for us. You’ve got to clean up your act.”‘
Yet, even as the alderman lambastes saloons and other liquor licensees in public, his aides fail to show up in court with key photographs of a dilapidated building that houses one particularly dreadful bar.
And, even as Mell acknowledges to neighborhood leaders that the 30 or so liquor establishments on a milelong stretch of Irving Park Road are too many, his staff members work to bring yet another bar onto the street.
With his ferocious political organization and an alderman’s powers under city law, Mell has near veto power over whether a liquor establishment can operate in his ward. But, for all his hot words, he rarely throws that weight around.
Throughout his career, Mell has taken in tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from liquor licensees in his ward–even from one bar owner whom Mell frequently characterizes in public as a slum landlord.
“So?” the alderman says. “One has nothing to do with the other.”
But why does Mell need money from such contributors?
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“To pay for things. For teams you sponsor. For the cost of running elections.”
Mell collects a lot of money.
Campaign records, which are notably incomplete in Illinois, show that, since 1979, Mell and his organization have received at least $2.3 million in contributions.
During that time, Mell faced only one serious challenger as alderman, and he won that race by a margin of nearly 4 to 1. No one ran against him as Democratic committeeman in that period.
Last year, no one was courageous enough–or foolhardy enough–to challenge Mell’s re-election to the council. Still, he and his organization were unflagging in their fundraising efforts.
Their take? $215,000.
The last laugh
Sometimes, Dick Mell can’t help but laugh.
Like when he tells the story of John Mattingly, a disabled Korean War vet–the alderman describes him as “shell-shocked”–who’s something of an eccentric in his neighborhood on Troy Street.
Mattingly’s home is a solidly built, 1950s-era, single-story brick bungalow, but it was his high fence and his two-story, jury-rigged garage that irritated his neighbors.
In 1990, at the prompting of Mell and his organization, the city hauled Mattingly into court for building code violations. “It’s an eyesore to the community,” Mell testified.
Mattingly contended that the real reason he was singled out was because he had campaigned on behalf of Mell’s opponent in the previous aldermanic election. His property, he argued, was no more of an eyesore than others on his block.
But he had no lawyer and no money to hire one. And, following the mysterious alteration of a court order that led to Mattingly’s failure to attend an end-of-the-year hearing, the Housing Court judge ordered the sheriff’s police to bring the veteran to court.
However, when the deputies got around to arresting Mattingly, they took him instead to the Cook County Jail.
Mell laughs as he tells this part of the story.
“I guess he was kind of vociferous. I guess he was really loud, from what the sheriff tells me or from what I hear from someone.”
The alderman laughs again.
“Then he got lost in the jail for 10 days. I don’t know why he got lost or how he got lost.”
Eventually, Mattingly convinced a judge that a mistake had been made. And, once free, he filed a federal suit, charging that the initial housing complaint against him had been politically motivated. Rather than contest the charges, the city agreed to pay him $32,500.
Still fighting with city officials over his property, Mattingly blames Mell for his Kafkaesque experience.
But the alderman positively sputters at the idea that he had any responsibility:
“How? Who? How? Who? How, how, how, how, how, how in the hell could I get someone lost in Cook County Jail?”
Then Mell calms down and says:
“Let me tell you what people say about me: I’m too nice.”